SUNNYVALE, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—November 12, 2008—
AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced the new AMD FireStream™
9270 compute accelerator and the latest version of its free and open ATI
Stream Software Development Kit (SDK), version 1.3. Both are designed to
help researchers, technical professionals and IT organizations use
mainstream computing platforms to address challenges that once would
have required multi-million-dollar investments in proprietary hardware
and software.

Today’s announcements also advance the company’s
corporate brand and strategy, called Fusion, by further enabling AMD
graphics processors (GPUs) to work in concert with CPUs to deliver
balanced platforms capable of increasing performance, energy-efficiency,
and cost-effectiveness.

“The demands of the high-performance
datacenter are intense, with dramatic increases in problem complexity
and size every year. Customers need to achieve ever higher
performance-per-watt and performance-per-dollar in order to address
these problems with the same infrastructures. The AMD FireStream 9270
compute accelerator was designed to address all of these concerns and
more,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice
president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. “Delivering
two times the double-precision floating point performance of competing
offerings, and armed with 2GB of ultra-fast, ultra-high bandwidth
memory, the AMD FireStream 9270 is the ideal solution for dramatically
accelerating technical applications.”1

The AMD FireStream 9270 delivers supercomputing-class performance,
deployable in a wide variety of server and workstation configurations.
It has a typical board power requirement of only 160 watts, yet provides
over 1.2 teraFLOPS of single-point precision performance —
the most available in a single-GPU solution today —
and over 240 gigaFLOPS of double-point precision performance.1
It includes two gigabytes of Graphics Double Data Rate, version 5 memory
(GDDR5) for greater overall data throughput and processing of larger
data-sets. It comes with a three-year limited warranty.

System and Software Developers

AMD is working with leading system and software developers to help
ensure broad availability of GPU accelerated end-solutions for a wide
range of uses.

One such company is Aprius, which develops high bandwidth server
interconnect systems that bring new levels of scaling, resource sharing
and low-latency performance to the data center.

With help from AMD, Aprius plans to bring to market a solution for
connecting up to eight AMD FireStream 9270 computer accelerators within
a rack mounted chassis, hosted in a server cluster via multiple 80 Gbps
PCI Express (PCIe) optical links. This results in 9.6 teraFLOPS of
processing horsepower and 16GB of high speed memory over up to four PCIe
buses. Dubbed the Aprius Computational Acceleration System, it provides
new innovations in native PCIe interconnect over optical cables that
allows PCIe 2.0 connections up to 50m in length, easy in-rack
installation and maintenance, and transparent support for all OS
environments. The technology is expected to be demonstrated at
Supercomputing 2008 in Austin, Texas next week.

AMD is also working closely with long-time partner HP on the HP
Accelerator Program, to ensure AMD FireStream compute accelerators are
validated for use in HP ProLiant servers.

AMD is also working closely with Brown Deer Technology, a company that
provides consulting and software development services to clients solving
complex and computationally challenging problems in high-performance
computing.

“Using the ATI Stream SDK and Brook+
compiler, we’ve obtained GPU accelerated
benchmarks on a range of algorithms, from electromagnetic and seismic
wave solvers to particle-based calculations. These are important
algorithms for modeling and simulation that impact wireless
communication, oil and gas exploration, and physics and chemistry
research,” said David Richie, president of
Brown Deer Technology. “We’ve
seen tremendous speed up, in some cases more than a 120x.2
The results have generated a lot of interest from customers.”

It is expected to be released in conjunction with the ATI Catalyst™
v8.12 software driver, which is planned to include ATI Stream software
enablement allowing millions of users of ATI Radeon graphics cards to
run ATI Stream-enabled applications. Version 1.3 of the ATI Stream SDK
also includes significant improvements to the Brook+ runtime and kernel
language, allowing for increased stability, flexibility and performance
when compared to prior version of the SDK.